Can I Go Home Now?
by SoMepOPCoRnFairY
Summary: They're not the heroes the world needs, but the ones that it deserves...Because Here Comes Honey Boo-Boo is aired on what was once known as the Learning Channel, and that is a grievous misdeed that can not go unpunished. In short, sometimes, the least likely heroes really can come out on top...Of their opponents smouldering remains. Wait, they don't HAVE to kill them? Oh, well...
1. Prologue, Sort Of

**Disclaimer: Welp, time for the same old song and dance: I don't own any of the franchises mentioned here. There, I said it. And it makes me feel sad. But not really. Warning: Here there be an OC protagonist. Well, more like deuteragonist. Whatever. **

Hero. Defined by the Oxford dictionary as a person, typically a man, who is admired or idealized for courage, outstanding achievements, or noble qualities; the chief male character in a book, play, or movie, who is typically identified with good qualities, and with whom the reader is expected to sympathize; a person of superhuman qualities and often semi-divine origin, in particular one of those whose exploits and dealings with the gods were the subject of ancient Greek myths and legends. At first glance, the word hero brings to mind such idealised concepts as chivalry, strength of character, unshakeable conviction…Basically, the word hero brings to mind a metric ton of nebulous bull shit that's been romanticised by the tales of old and the television and literature of today due to mankind's fallacious desire to have some poor schmuck be screwed over by fate to be obligated to save the day so that they don't have to.

Ah, yes, screwed over by fate. Why do I mention that, you ask? No? Well, too bad, because this story is all about getting screwed over, and if you're here to read a story about kumbaya and the power of friendship and what have you, then you can piss right the hell off, hippie, and take your doobie with you. This tale is a bukkake of being screwed over and thus screwing everyone else over in return twice as hard. A screwkkake, if you will, only with a lesser possibility of transmitting herpes.

Anyway, where was I before all this talk of screwkkake? Oh, yes: A person who feels unjustly bent over in front of fate due to having been granted the dubious honour of being a hero when really, they just wanted to be left the hell alone. And what better way to drag a schizoid-personality, sarky (yes, this is an actual word) recluse into a life of unwelcome heroism than by forcing them to be a participant in The Holy Grail War, a.k.a. the convoluted contrivance founded by three families of overambitious gasbags in which everyone participating gets dicked unless they happen to be a colossal asshole outsizing that of Goatse?

So that we don't get any whinging from purists, it shall henceforth be established that this tale takes place in an alternate universe than that of which the majority of you are used to. I, as the omnipotent narrator could give a detailed account of the myriad atrocities that shall take place in this aforementioned universe, but I'm really not in the mood to elucidate on _that _pile of rubbish. To make things easier for all of us in the long-run, let's just say that it is the result of a drunken tryst between Fate/Zero, Carnival Phantasm, Harry Potter, the works of H.P. Lovecraft, and one person's warped little mind. In short, don't be expecting much, if any, of the Nasuverse rules regarding magic to come into play here, because that brand of magic is more complex than a Baroque cantata and attention spans are in short supply here. Actually, just expect plentiful deviations from all of the source materials in general, because really, they're just vague guidelines to make the jerking around of the characters here more amusing. With that out of the way, and your interest diminished, please, enjoy the show.

**A/N: Let's see, zero character development (or introduction, for that matter) and I have no idea whether to put this in the Fate/stay night section or the crossover section. If it only includes elements/rules from a universe and not actual character appearances, does it count as a crossover? So many questions…Sounds like we're off to a great start!**


	2. Douche in the Golden Shell

**Disclaimer: No, I still don't own any of the franchises mentioned here. Stop asking me already, sheesh!**

Chapter One: Douche in the Golden Shell

"And thus, the ritual known as The Holy Grail War, as established by the three founding families, has been occurring ever since. A more glorious competition to decide ownership of the Holy Grail could never possibly have yak, yak, blah, blah, dribble fucking dribble. Pretentious dickbags."

Slamming the massive leather tome entitled _The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today_ shut and causing a cloud of dust to waft lazily into the air as she did so, Ciara Glaisyer then proceeded to toss the book aside. It flew the length of her bedroom before smacking into a wall, sliding down the green damask wallpaper and landing on the carpeting with a sound not unlike that of a human wail.

She folded her arms behind her head and threw herself backwards onto her four-poster bed, bouncing several times before coming to a halt. "Bloody melodramatic authors," she muttered with a roll of her eyes. "_Glorious competition_…," Ciara said derisively, kicking her feet against the backboard. "Anyone or anything that promises to grant a wish always has some sort of ulterior motive. One that involves the moron with the wish getting buggered with a stainless steel dil-_Irony, I hate irony…" _

Letting out a hiss more of annoyance than pain, she looked down at her right hand, upon which she could see the faint online of what at first glance appeared to be a bruise. As she continued to stare at it, however, the marking, previously no more distinct than a splash of ink, began to form into a distinct pattern and darkened from grey to bright crimson. In a matter of moments, Ciara, much to her exasperation, found herself the not-particularly-proud owner of a command seal.

"Argh, fuck me…" She squinted down at the command seal emblazoned across the back of her hand. It was quite striking, in an eerie sort of way, looking not unlike a segmented Venetian half-masque with a protuberance of feathers sprouting from the edge and what appeared to be a diamond-shaped tear beneath the 'eye'. "Looks like something an overdramatic Muggle student would get on a dare after going on a bender," she concluded disparagingly.

Snorting, Ciara fumbled for her wand on the bedside table, came up three inches short, and resigned herself to rolling over in order to accommodate her lack of reach, somehow dragging off the duvet as she did so. Fingers closing around the handle, she idly pointed her wand in the general direction of the book she had tossed aside earlier. _The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today _floated into her outstretched left hand, and, with another flick of her wand, Ciara flipped it open to page 394.

"Masters chosen at random; no shit, Sherlock…Many worlds theory; disturbing to think of me with a dick…Received Command Seal, yes, yes I did, unfortunately…Servants are assigned according to either compatibility or incompatibility with Master's personality…Oho, nice sense of Schadenfreude there, I'll admit …Some Servants might present a danger to the Master/general public…Cool…A _sexual_ danger…" Ciara paused for a moment. "How the hell do rapists become Heroic Spirits? Was rape considered heroic back in the day? Damn…Once in the possession of Command Seal, Master must utilise all three of them in order to lose their status as a contender. Fantastic, now how else do I escape from this clusterfuck?" Eyes beginning to ache from their constant darting about from her speed-reading, Ciara skipped several paragraphs in favour of perusing the bottom of the page.

"Let's see," she continued, "Due to incidents of mass surrender in prior wars, forfeiture is no longer an option…I see."

Delicately closing her copy of _The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today, _Ciara slipped off her bed, placed the book on the floor, and, with an utterly beatific expression playing across her face, proceeded to blast the tome with a spell that reduced it, and a portion of the carpeting and stone floor beneath it into a smouldering pile of ash.

She'd pointed her wand down through the gaping hole in the floor in order to further destroy any possibly remaining evidence of the book when Ciara found her compulsion for excessive destruction interrupted by a repetitive tapping. A quick glance to her left revealed the source of the sound to be a mottled black and tawny eagle owl with a scroll of parchment clutched in its talons, beating its beak against the window pane and glowering balefully at her through narrowed orange eyes.

She groaned. "Oh, God, it's my parents_._"

With the air of a person who's dealt with several lifetimes of horror, Ciara threw open the window, only to drop to her knees with her arms folded protectively above her head when the owl, angered by her lack of speed in admitting him indoors, flew at her face with a disdainful shriek.

When the furious bird, after several seconds of circling above her like a vulture awaiting its prey's death rattle decided to quit screwing with her frazzled nerves and dive bombed her, Ciara found herself saved by the timely appearance of her oversized half-kneazle Maine Coon, Tealeaf, whom promptly launched all twenty-six pounds of himself at the owl, knocking it clean out of the air. While the two were engaged in a cartoonish dust cloud death battle of claws versus talons, Ciara took the opportunity to grab and unfurl the parchment, which had been abandoned off to the side by the owl that was coming to resemble a down pillow that had been tossed into a grain thresher.

Rolling her eyes upon noticing the familiar crest stamped at the bottom of the letter in a rust-coloured liquid that looked suspiciously like blood, Ciara gritted her teeth and prepared for the worst. Then, she began to read despite the commotion of the pugnacious yowls and tinkle of broken china emanating in the background.

_Dear Ciara,_

_If you've received this letter, then I thank both God in heaven and the faithful nature of our owl, Alfred, for managing to bypass your no-doubt excessive protective wards and whatever mad Muggle contraptions that I'm sure you've surrounded your home with. Speaking of which, I sincerely hope that you've abandoned your pipe dream of creating a line of magical trick sex toys. I will admit, the dildo that screams in angry German before spouting legs and running away seems …interesting, to say the least, but I doubt that the Ministry of Magic will allow you to patent it. And the pseudo-vagina that disparages the user's penis size and lack of a real sex life right before becoming full of razor-blade fangs? Not going to happen. The Misuse of Muggle Artefacts Office will be, as you young people say, all over your arse. Not to mention the Improper Use of Magic Office. It would be an orgy of lawsuits. Ugh, that was awkward to write. _

_Ahem. Anyway, as I was saying previously, for the sake of all that is holy, turn your focus to nobler, or at least saner, pursuits. I am begging you Ciara. __**Begging. **__Forget this bizarre vendetta against onanism of yours and turn your eye onto a more traditional line of work. Really, you dream of combining magic and Muggle inventions to 'usher in a glorious new era of blue balls' after having achieved ten O.W.L.s and receiving straight O's on your N.E.W.T.s? What does that even __**MEAN?! **__You were the brightest witch of your year, for God's sake! And yet, with all of your potential, you squander your time and energy on __**screaming rubber phalluses?! **__Well, not anymore, Ciara! NOT ANYMORE! From here on, there will be no more of this madness! I swear on the graves of our ancestors, our ancestors who would be rolling in their aforementioned graves if they weren't either dust or ghosts, that if you don't start on another path, I will cut you off from your trust fund and your inheritance faster than a mohel does a foreskin! Oh yes, I went there! _

_And another thing, I-Oh, Wilhelm, calm down. Really, if you're so agitated, go sit in the tub, light some candles, and wait for a bit while I ready the-Oh dear, now look what I've written. Oh, well, all children have to deal with their parent's sex life sometimes. _

_Hello Ciara, it's mum! My apologies for that little insight into your father's and I's adventures, but really, you should be glad that the two of us are still in love! And we're __**extremely **__in love. Obscenely, even. Oh, how we are…_

_But back to the point at hand. Your father was supposed to congratulate you on being selected as a participant in The Holy Grail War, but, as you can see, he got a bit…derailed. As to how we knew you were nominated before you did, well, word spreads quickly, dear. That's shorthand for 'we covertly entered you in without your knowledge to bring honour to the family name and so had first-hand access to the selection processes.' Surprise! As to how we did so, well, let's just say that money talks and leave it at that. Anyway, I'm certain that you'll make us proud. After all, you're quite the brilliant witch, even if you do spend more of your free time transfiguring your fingers into cutlery in order to simplify the spaghetti-eating process and using Permanent Sticking charms to glue your actual cutlery to the ceiling in order to confuse potential burglars._

_-Love, your mum and dad_

_P.S. When are you going to get married? I want grandchildren! Eighteen is prime baby-having time!_

Ciara cleared her throat. "Well, that both filled me with a great deal of morbid curiosity and obliterated the last lingering thread of any sexual urges I might have had. Good times. And don't diss the screaming rubber penises, I'm making progress," she said, frowning at the letter as though it were her father. Setting the letter on the bedside table, she sat down on the bed beside Tealeaf, who promptly curled up in her lap, a distinct note of triumph in his rumbling purr. Ciara scratched him beneath his chin. "Welp, looks like I have a summoning circle to draw," she said. "Eventually."

In response, Tealeaf jerked his head at the mess of blood and ruffled feathers splattered across the floor, as if to say 'I've got you covered.' Ciara grinned ruefully as her fluffy companion rolled onto his back, legs beating against the air in a facsimile of walking.

"Not to diminish your work, but I think it needs to be a bit neater," she apologised. "Huh, I _could _just transfigure my fingers into quills and draw it like that," Ciara added thoughtfully.

Levelling her with an unamused look, Tealeaf merely leapt off of the bed, hacked up a wad of damp feathers, and strutted out of the room with his raccoon-like tail held high, only to return several minutes later with a stoppered vial of chicken blood clutched in his mouth. Dropping the vial onto the floor, he batted it towards her, mewling expectedly.

Ciara groaned. "All right, all right, we'll do it _your _way."

Tealeaf tugged the stopper out of the vial with his teeth with a soft _pop _and gave her the satisfied smile that can only be performed by a feline who has once again gotten their master to do their bidding.

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

Stepping back to admire her newly completed summoning circle, Ciara allowed herself a bit of gratification at a job…Well, at least done if not _well _done.

"Damn, this thing was a bitch to do," she muttered, wiping her bloodied hands against a washrag. "Fucking squiggly lines…Should've gone the quill-finger route, but Tealeaf is so damn persuasive. The six-pointed star is a nice aversion to the whole occult vibe this shit lets out, though-I was honestly expecting it to have to be a pentagram or something else appropriately 'dark'."

Fumbling for her now blood-stained copy of _The Holy Grail War: From Yesterday to Today, _Ciara turned to page 803 and read aloud: "After the completion of the summoning circle, you must recite the following chant." She blinked. "Chant, really?" Ciara demanded incredulously. "I thought this was supposed to be a war, not a poetry slam." Then she shrugged. "Meh, whatever, this whole day has been full of increasingly convoluted surprises. Time to see if I did this shit right or just need to replace the carpeting."

Clearing her throat, she began to recite the invocation.

"Ye first, O silver, O iron…What the hell does that even _mean?_"

"O stone of the foundation, O Archduke of the Contract."

"Hear me in the name of our great teacher, the Archmage Merlin."

"Let the descending winds be as a wall…Wind is fucking insubstantial. Worst. Wall. _Ever_."

"Let the gates in all directions be shut, rising above the crown, and let the three-forked roads to the Kingdom revolve."

"Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut. Shut…What exactly are we shutting here?"

"Five perfections for each repetition…Huh, I suppose that means that I just buggered up that last bit. Eh, who cares?"

"And now, let the filled sigils be annihilated in my stead…Yeah, the hell with you, sigils."

"Set."

"Let thy body rest under my dominion; let my fate rest in thy blade…Yeah, _that _isn't going to screw me over in the end, trusting some wank-off from the past with my fate."

"If thou submittest to the call of the Holy Grail War and if thou wilt obey this mind, this reason, then thou shalt respond. And if you don't want to, that's cool too."

"I make my oath here…With great trepidation."

"I am that person who is to become the virtue of all Heaven…That actually sounds rather nice."

"I am that person who is covered with the evil of all hell…Eh, isn't that a direct contradiction of what I just…ugh, never mind. _Hyperbole._"

"Thou seven heavens, clad in a trinity of words…Pretty sure that's not grammatically correct, but hey, who I am to question whoever wrote this? Maybe it's a bad translation from the original language or something."

"Come past thy restraining rings, and be thou the hands that protect the balance…Seriously, if you don't want to come past thy restraining rings or protect the balance, I'm fine with that. I wouldn't want to impose. Besides, the balance has been pretty fucked for a while anyway ever since the dinosaurs got hit by that meteor and humans started wearing pants instead of free-balling."

Despite the sudden onset of malevolent cold that began to engulf her as her magical core began to writhe and throb inside of her, sending odd tendrils of prana spasming through her every nerve, Ciara's voice remained a bored deadpan. When sparks began to crackle along the edges of the summoning circle, she felt a slight tug of interest. When the summoning circle began to glow with a phosphorescent light that cast odd flickering shadows along the walls, she began to wonder if perhaps she should have a shield charm at the ready. The entirety of the pattern scrawled across the carpet suddenly floating up to the ceiling threw her for a loop, if only because she couldn't quite gouge what exactly the point of it was aside from looking pretty wicked. Of course, the theatrics weren't over. They never were so quickly.

"Aaaaaand, here comes the archetypical 'violent gust of wind despite the window being closed," Ciara noted. "Yep," she said, nodding her head sagely as the sudden onslaught of the localised whirlwind proceeded to upend her bedroom, shattering all of the fragile items in the vicinity into fragments before overturning the heavier objects. "Can't delve into the arcane without it."

Ciara frowned when the supernatural wind only managed to push her four-poster several inches to the left. "Is that really all you've got, aether?" She demanded, disappointed at the lack of credible destruction. "I can blow up a dormitory with a misaimed Blasting Curse and you can barely even move a _bed_?"

Stepping aside when the bed in question was hurled in her direction as though as a rejoinder to what the supernatural maelstrom perceived to be her insulting its pride as a force of destruction, Ciara nodded, looking pleased. "Now _that's _more like it. If property damage isn't enough to require at least eight hours of clean-up, you're doing it wrong."

While Ciara took in the scene with newfound reverence for the spectacle known as a summoning ritual, the ritual itself, as if attempting to verify its talent for bitching visual effects in addition to its destructive capabilities, proceeded to perform the pièce de résistance in the form of a red mist filling the room, hanging thickly in the air like a bloodied shroud. Finally, there was a blinding flash of light followed by a sound like a thousand peals of thunder rolled into one massive sonic shockwave; peering into the mirror slumped against the wall behind her, Ciara saw a jagged bolt of lightning reflected in its cracked surface. Shoving her wildly thrashing hair away from her face, she turned back to face the summoning circle, anxious to see the entirety of the thing through.

She managed to clear her line of vision just in time to see a cyclone of golden light spinning in the centre of the summoning circle. There was the xylophone glissando of breaking glass as the howling winds increased in speed, blowing out the window. Tendrils of smoked curled into the air as the sparks dancing along the circle's edge burst into flame that went out almost instantaneously.

The Servant appeared in a final flash of light.

He was a tall man, with the sort of pretty boy features that seemed to have been formed with the express purpose of being twisted into a glare of the utmost hauteur, and the highly polished golden armour encasing him looked to be worth enough to feed several families for the rest of their lives. Combined with his arrogant demeanour, which was enhanced by his tightly folded arms and gravity-defying blonde hair, the Servant she had summoned could only be summarised as…

"A complete and utter douchebag," Ciara muttered, pinching the bridge of her nose in exasperation. "A massive, throbbing varicose dick vein. Of all of the Servants I could have summoned, I get the one who's such an enormous douchebag that I can sense the pH levels of all of the twat's within a five-mile radius being thrown out of balance. And he has a face like an Auror sketch of a rapist. _Brilliant._"

Her rant was interrupted by the distinctive clanking of steel, and before she could react, Ciara found herself face to face with her irate servant. Due to the close proximity, she could see that his was a restrained fury, the undoubtedly burning inferno of his rage betrayed only by the corrosive light in his crimson eyes. _Red eyes for the bad guy, eh? How passé. Pretty eerie, though. Looks sort of like that bloke who sat behind me in Alchemy class, the one who liked turning beer into piss. What a waste of perfectly good-_

"Woman," her Servant began in a coldly furious tone, effectively cutting off her internal rambling, "I've tolerated your first few insults upon my person to go unpunished only for a select few reasons, a fact for which you should feel greatly honoured." His eyes swept over her as he spoke, leaving Ciara with the urge to cast several Scourgify's upon herself before scrubbing herself with steel wool and surgical spirit while sobbing in the tub. "However," he continued, "You're rapidly testing my patience. Speak one more slight upon the King of Heroes, mongrel, and I assure you that my previous latitude towards your insolence will be replaced with the utmost-

Unable to take any more of his rape face boring holes into her, or his flowery speech, for that matter, Ciara slid her wand out of her sleeve and pointed it at her Servant's face, taking a moment to snigger inwardly at the way his eyes crossed before shouting "Confringo!"

The curse exploded in his face, the rapid increase of the local temperature resulting in a massive fireball that flew around the room, bouncing from floor to ceiling to wall, blowing the mirror, her wardrobe, her bed, and the entirety of the ceiling to pieces and burning a section of the western wall to ash before rebounding back at her. Ciara managed to prevent herself from being turned into a black imprint on the wall behind her with a timely "Finite Incantatem", although not before she wound up with a few minor burns on her wand hand.

Before she could tend to herself, Ciara once again found herself nose to nose with her Servant, who was not only completely unharmed save for being covered in a fine layer of soot, but who, judging by the violent twitching of his right eye, had his rage pushed past critical mass and delving into a realm of unbridled wrath unknown to man. He could barely even form coherent words, instead uttering a guttural series of disjointed snarls that sounded vaguely like "_Impudent wench…Dare…Interrupt and then have the gall to attack…Disrespect your king…" _

It was, Ciara thought, rather funny to see the previously dignified man reduced to a spluttering pile of incoherent rage. Scratch that; it was hilarious. True, she'd probably pay for it sooner rather than later, but watching him have what appeared to be a standing seizure induced by pure indignation was too good to pass up. "Wish I hadn't blown up my camera just now," she sighed.

Teeth bared in a smile that looked more like the contortion of teeth that a lion might give a wounded gazelle, her Servant pulled out what appeared to be a sword fashioned in the shape of a key. Holding it vertically in the air, he turned it as though unlocking some colossal door invisible to the human eye. As the parts around the sword's grip began to rotate of their own accord, emitting an odd glow momentarily before settling back into place, upon which a large, labyrinth-like, red pattern suddenly appeared in the sky revealed by the destroyed ceiling, Ciara began to wonder if he hadn't in fact opened some sort of door. When the labyrinth receded into a small orb from which a myriad of weapons ranging from swords to battle-axes to what appeared to be a jimmy bar soared out from the orb in order to levitate behind him, all aimed at her and veritably thrumming with the anticipation of stabbing through her flesh at 110 miles per hour, Ciara realised that she'd been right. _So, he has access to an endless armoury, eh?_ She thought. _The more you know…_

"Well," she said with a shrug, "I'm right and truly fucked."

"Indeed. _Gate of Babylon._"

With a snap of his fingers, the weapons behind him proceeded to rain themselves down at her in a literal maelstrom of death. As they made their descent, whistling through the air, the Servant's rictus-like smirk and twitching eye reflected in their varnished steel edges, Ciara could only form the thought: _Totally fucking worth it. _

**Author's Note: Ah, nothing like putting characters through the ringer the first chapter in. Also, Gilgamesh is totally a dick, but an awesome dick, and therefore this attempted murder is completely justified. I don't even know if I'm being sarcastic or genuine right now. All I know is Ciara has either a death wish or brass bollocks so big that they have their own gravitational pull. Possibly both. **


	3. Coming to an Understanding (Sort Of)

**Disclaimer: I think it's already been established that I don't own anything besides original characters/concepts. Oh, and a really nice lamp (it's expensive, at any rate.) **

**Chapter 2: Coming to an Understanding (Sort of)**

Having long since had her wand reduced to a pile of splinters, Ciara found herself wondering why she and her family had even bothered to entertain the delusion of following the rules of the Harry Potter universe for so long anyway. God knew that the Clockwork Tower had been pissed off enough at the fact that there were thousands of people hidden in plain sight across the world whom had access to what the stuffy bastards liked to call 'anarchistic magic the scope of which has never before been seen.' Add in the fact that those people had since 1997 taken a liking to using inoperable sticks and shouting spells in dog Latin had nearly given the council of the Clockwork Tower a simultaneous aneurysm.

"Oh, yeah, _that's_ why," she said aloud. "Anything to bust their balls."

Sighing when the air once again warped as thousands of glowing weapons slid into reality, Ciara barely managed to sidestep what felt like the tenth onslaught of flying projectiles. By sidestepped, meaning that she scrambled through the dry heat of multiple explosions as a series of shockwaves passed over her, nearly sending her sprawling into a fruit stand that had caught fire from a misfired round. She actually would have found it pretty cool if it weren't for the stench of burning flesh and petrol permeating the air, the torn pavement and broken glass of storefronts ricocheting around her like so much shrapnel and the fact that her left eardrum was bleeding.

Oh yeah, she had teleported (she had vowed from this day forward to never again utter the word Apparate, or anything else Harry Potter-related again) into the nearest town, resulting in millions in property damage and dozens of wrongful death claims that would probably creep into the hundreds given a couple of minutes. Oops?

Shouting over the din of explosions in an attempt to warn the group of senior citizens riding power scooters up ahead, she jumped over a low-flying Noble Phantasm that bore more than a passing resemblance to a self-playing electric guitar and which promptly burst into a seemingly endless sphere of shrapnel as soon as it touched ground.

The old people were immediately reduced to a mulch-like consistency, splattering Ciara in a warm, sticky shower of blood and viscera. It felt like her last family trip to the Los Cascadas water park to visit relatives in the Caribbean, but with more carnage (there had been an incident which she was in no way related to).

"Music slays the savage beast…Or at least some hapless seniors," she said dryly as she dodged a caravan-sized pair of scissors that nearly sliced her head off. Unfortunately, she'd expended so much energy into not getting turned into a vertical smear on the ground that Ciara hadn't paid attention to where she was running. Hence, upon turning the corner, she found herself boxed into the perpetual twilight of an alley located between a butcher's shop and a clock maker's, face to face with a…Metallic horse with a jagged blade-like horn protruding from its forehead?

Ciara regarded the shiny anomaly for a moment, her bewildered expression slowly morphing into one of utter annoyance as she realized that what she was currently seeing was in fact not the side effect of a concussion. "Well shit," she said. "An honest-to-God robot unicorn."

Stymied at this newest turn of events, she sank to her knees, oblivious to the grit digging into her flesh and the fact that were likely used hypodermics scattered amongst the dirt. "That fucker really _does _have a prototype of everything in that gate of his," Ciara muttered. A thoughtful look crossed her face. "I wonder if he's got a prototype Eminence Monster Metal…"

Just as the unicorn simulacrum began to paw the dirt, head lowered and nostrils emitting steam as it prepared to charge, she pulled herself to her feet, determined to at least die standing if she were to be killed in such a ridiculous fashion.

As it ran at her, hooves lifting off the ground momentarily from its speed, synthetic skin catching what little sunlight filtered into the alley and throwing prisms of rainbow-hued light in every direction, it came to a grinding halt (literally, she could hear the gears inside of it grating against one another) upon coming within several inches of her.

Ciara looked on confusedly as the robotic unicorn sank onto all fours and laid its head in her lap, docile as a kitten.

"Oh, that's just anticlimactic," she declared as she absentmindedly stroked its muzzle.

"Yes, quite," her Servant said from his perch atop the roof of the butcher's shop. Leaping down with a dramatic fluttering of his red cloak, he landed before her, golden armour clanking with each of his movements. The noise frightened off her new robot buddy, who cantered off with a frightened whinny and accidently impaled an unfortunate paperboy through the heart upon reaching the opposite pavement.

"Yeah, that kind of takes away your gravitas," Ciara noted. At the half-confused, half-irritated glare that he threw her way, she added "You sound like a bunch of trash bins being thrown around in a hurricane. Or a Transformer having sex with a dryer full of ball bearings."

Drawing himself up with a huff, the gold-clad servant gestured towards his armour. "I'll have you know, foolish girl, that my armour is crafted by the gods-whom I despise, by the way, but that's neither here nor there," he informed her with more than a hint of annoyance creeping into his otherwise haughty tone.

Ciara, however, was unable to appreciate his explanation, as she was engrossed in staring at a passing dandelion clock floating in the breeze. "…What's your point?" She asked after it had drifted away.

The Servant slapped a hand against his forehead. "It means," He said through gritted teeth, "That though it may seem as such to your plebeian human ears, my armour most certainly does _not _sound like, as you so eloquently put it, 'like a bunch of trash bins being thrown around in a hurricane. Or that second bit of idiocy you spewed earlier. Mongrel," he added in a disdainful mumble.

"Whatever you say Goldilocks," Ciara said agreeably from her spot on the ground, bringing her shoulders up in a shrug. "That reminds me: Why are you a blonde, lily-white pretty boy, anyway? If you're the two thirds-god king of Babylon-seriously weird understanding of mathematics and biology back then, by the way-shouldn't you be a bronzed, bearded behemoth instead of an Abercrombie model?"

There followed a long pause in which the Servant gaped at her and she looked toward the mostly un-ruined butcher's shop and reminded herself to pick up some lamb shank eventually.

"How did you glean my identity, mongrel?" Gilgamesh demanded. "I know for a fact that your summoning of me was through chance rather than deliberation."

Rather than immediately answering him, Ciara instead craned her neck to look up at the sky. "Wasn't all that difficult to piece together, really," she said after a moment, mauve eyes squinting slightly as she continued to stare upward. "Especially considering the fact that one of the swords you flung at me had the words 'Property of Gilgamesh' engraved on the hilt, along with what looked like a dick. A really big one, too. The dick drawing, I mean, not the sword; the sword was pretty average."

Exhaling loudly, Gilgamesh pinched the bridge of his nose, looking as though he didn't know whether to laugh or scream. "Damn it, Enkidu," he muttered under his breath. "I knew that your love of scrawling phalluses on my belongings would be my undoing." Redirecting his attention to Ciara, who had yet to tear her gaze away from the clouds, Gilgamesh, miffed that anyone would dare to ignore his presence in such a fashion, snapped "Woman, what exactly in the sky is so interesting that you would gawk up at it like a slack-jawed imbecile?"

Gesturing for him to look up with her index finger, Ciara said simply "Missiles."

"Oh," Gilgamesh said with a nod. "I see." As the whistling shriek of the incoming missiles increased in volume, he turned to Ciara, who hadn't made an effort to move. "Either you have a death wish or a plan. From what I've seen of you so far, I'm not sure which one is a more disconcerting notion," he observed.

"Column B," she confirmed.

Gilgamesh looked down at her when she moved into a crouch, the sleepy/bored expression that appeared to be her default never leaving her face as she began to mutter a series of disjointed words under her breath.

"_This_ ought to be an interesting spectacle," he commented before pulling a jewel-encrusted throne with a heavily cushioned seat from out of the Gate of Babylon and settling down on it.

It was certainly a spectacle, in any case. As soon as the rocket had reached within two feet of her, Ciara extended her hand and grasped it by the nose. The air around her wavered from the sudden influx of prana even as the missile violently ignited as though it had been packed full of dynamite, sending shards of molten steel in every direction with a resonating boom that knocked her flat on her face.

"Ow," she coughed into the dirt as she sent up a half-assed shield to shelter her from the worst of the shrapnel with what remained of her prana.

Gilgamesh nudged Ciara, who had conveniently landed right in front of him with his foot. "While it's refreshing to see that you've learned your place, we have no time for foreplay," he drawled.

Ciara curled up onto her side and brought the furry-lined hood of her jacket over her head. "Ugh, go away you gold-plated shit gibbon," she groaned. "You spew so much hot air it's like listening to the planet Jupiter, and my prana is lower than a midget's balls right now. Now's not exactly a good time. Or ever, really," she added.

Rather than the expected furious outburst, Gilgamesh merely let out a hearty laugh as he got up from his throne. Hauling her up by the back of her oversized cargo jacket, he dangled his half-heartedly struggling Master in front of him like a wayward kitten. "Normally, I would kill someone for daring to speak to me in such a manner, but I must admit, your pluck is amusing," he said, leering. "It's not often that I've emptied the Gate of Babylon to such extent, even if you _did _mostly just dodge."

Ciara rolled her eyes. "Lucky me," she deadpanned. "What with the creeptacular grin, I'm starting to think that it's better luck to gain your hatred than your interest."

Once again, Gilgamesh laughed at her. "In an age where the majority of the populace is content to bleat along in formation with the rest of the herd, it's refreshing to see a few who have some semblance of nerve."

"So…You like to be attacked and insulted?" Ciara asked, confusion written across her face.

"More that I enjoy audacious people whose endeavours are far beyond their reach, but I suppose there is a fair amount of overlap between the two," Gilgamesh admitted. "Speaking of which," he continued, "I wonder if it's a genetic predisposition of green-haired people to be so impudent. You're the fifth one I've spoken to, and so far you've all defied me in one way or the other."

Ciara dropped her chin into her hand, looking thoughtful. "My father is not only tied hand and foot by her apron strings but gets pegged by my mother on a nightly basis because she 'likes it when he bites the pillow', so I'm going to go with no. Although the both of us are really more of a mint than a straight-up green, so who knows?" She said, shrugging.

Gilgamesh shot her a dirty look. "Of the myriad effects that I've acquired, the sordid details of your parent's marriage are not one I wish to possess." His mouth twisted in distaste. "Nor the definitions and accompanying images delivered to me by the Grail, either," he added disgustedly.

"Tch, try walking in on that shit," Ciara snorted. "Nothing destroys someone's image of their parents like seeing their mother re-enacting _Last Tango in Paris _with their father, complete with butter. And everyone wonders why I have no interest in sex-Ow," she said as she was dropped onto the ground. "What was that fo-Geeze you bastard, tell me that we're playing _before_ you try to go for second base!"

This was exclaimed at the top of her lungs when Ciara found herself pinned against the alley wall, wrists above her head and bricks digging painfully into her back as Gilgamesh unceremoniously yanked her shorts and underwear down, his fingers rooting around in her nether regions like a team of archaeologists excavating the remnants of a prehistoric society.

After a few perfunctory 'hmms' and 'ahs', he released her, looking satisfied. "You're a virgin," Gilgamesh stated.

Buttoning her shorts, Ciara levelled him with a look that could have curdled milk. "I'm not sure how things worked back in the day, but in this day and age we generally _ask_ about someone's sexual experience rather than just shove our fingers in each other's orifices like Little Jack Horner with his pie. Just saying, it's considered pretty bad form nowadays."

Unperturbed by her unfavourable reaction, Gilgamesh simply folded his arms across his chest. "In my era I would have taken the same liberties as I did just now, only with far more than just my fingers." He leaned towards her, a predatory gleam in his eyes. "In fact," he said in a soft voice that nonetheless carried and made her skin crawl as though she'd been thrust into a tub of ice water, "What's to stop me from doing exactly that? Amusing though you might admittedly be, but I'm willing to bet that you'd be even more entertaining on your-

Before he could finish his sentence, Gilgamesh found himself interrupted by a series of annoyingly loud crunches that echoed throughout the dim alley like the rapid emptying of a gun's magazine into a pile of soda tins. Gritting his teeth against the sound, he scowled balefully at Ciara, who had procured a bag of Cheetos from her coat pocket and was eating the cheesy snack one piece at a time, as though to capitalise on the noise that she was making.

"Where did you get that from and why are you ignoring me when I speak to you?" Gilgamesh asked tersely.

Tossing a Cheeto up into the air and attempting to catch it in her mouth only to miss and have it hit her in the eye, Ciara winced, grasping her newest injury. "It came out of your Gate of Babylon. As for the second part, well, you're kind of a doucheboat," she admitted as she removed her hand from her eye.

"The Gate of Babylon most certainly does _not _contain those…those…_orange-dust coated atrocities_," Gilgamesh spat. "My treasury is home to all of the riches of the earth! The mere _thought _that it could possibly be host to such utter garbage is no less than an insult! And another thing," he added, voice increasing in volume with every word, "STOP IGNORING ME, DAMN YOU!" His tirade over, Gilgamesh fell back, face stained an angry red and breathing like he'd just run a marathon.

"Nah, I was just fucking with you," Ciara told the hyperventilating King of Heroes. "I ganked it off one of the corner shops you blew up." She tossed a handful of Cheetos into her mouth. "You're one needy S.O.B, by the way," she said as an afterthought, chewing. "Were you not hugged enough as a kid or something?"

A sneer formed across Gilgamesh's face, although it was slightly tempered by an undercurrent of something which looked suspiciously similar to uncertainty. "I'll have you know that my mother loved me very much, and I reciprocated," he retorted.

"Uh-huh," Ciara said knowingly, recognising the proverbial chink in his armour and deciding to poke at his exposed innards with the psychological equivalent of a tetanus-riddled nail. "What about your dad?" She asked.

There was a bout of silence that lasted for so long that Ciara had to check her watch twice to make sure that time hadn't come to a stop, which was a moot point seeing as how it had been broken during her desperate fleeing.

She was just about to sidle out of the alley in search of some Cidona to chase down her Cheetos with when she once again found herself being seized by an irate demi-god; an occurrence that she predicted was going to become a long-standing tradition for quite a while. Worse, she dropped her Cheetos.

Fingers digging into her shoulders with enough force to leave bruises, Gilgamesh leaned his face into hers, red eyes appearing vaguely insectoid in their wideness. Combined with their sudden proximity bringing them literally nose to nose, it was more than a little disconcerting. In fact, Ciara was pretty certain this was how the majority of murder-suicides began.

"Uh, our faces are touching…"

"You, offal, have just brought me to a most uncomfortable realisation," Gilgamesh intoned robotically. "Would you like to know what it is?"

"You're into children?" Ciara ventured despite herself. Her brow creased. "Hold on a second, did you just compare me to foie gras? Because-"

A deep, slightly manic laugh rumbled in Gilgamesh's chest, his shoulders shaking with mirth. Mentally, Ciara began to compose her will-She wanted a Viking funeral with excessive drinking on the part of the mourners.

"My sexual preferences are both all-encompassing and nigh-incomprehensible," Gilgamesh informed her in a relatively composed voice, cutting off her meandering thoughts.

"And no," he continued simply, "What you've made me realise is this: I hate my father." Having finally admitted the childhood trauma that had evidently been corroding his psyche for millennia, Gilgamesh stepped away from her, looking expectant.

Running a hand through her slightly frazzled waves, Ciara mustered up as much articulacy as she could under the circumstances. "Congratulations?" She asked rather than stated, grimacing inwardly at her lack of a proper response. Upon being presented with a glare that was probably the origin behind the superstition of people having the ability to kill with a single glance, she hastily wracked her brain for something more ego-boosting.

"I bet your dad was a total cunt," she tried again after a moment, looking unduly proud of herself.

However, Gilgamesh appeared to be pleased with this proclamation, judging by his nodding. "Indeed," he said. "I amass all of the treasures in the entire damned world, and that lowly bastard didn't even have the decency to give me so much as a 'well done.'" A shadow passing over his countenance, he continued in a dark voice with a lowly uttered "I refuse to so much as mention the tongue-lashing I received from him after the incident with the Bull of Heaven," before falling into a pensive silence.

Feigning a cough to dissuade the awkward hush that was currently reigning supreme, Ciara threw a longing look towards the alley's exit even as she began to slowly shuffle towards it.

"Good talk," she said, falsely cheerful. "I feel like we've really learned a lot about each oth-ACK," she choked upon being grabbed by her collar and spun around to face Gilgamesh, who yet again leaned in far too close for her liking.

"Did I say that you were allowed to leave?" He said calmly.

"No?"

Gilgamesh closed his eyes, looking tranquil as a monk on morphine. "Well then, perhaps you ought to sit down," he suggested.

"But-"

"_Sit_. _Down._"

Ciara raised an index finger and took a deep breath as though to argue only to think better of it and plunk down onto the ground with her legs crossed, where she proceeded to entertain herself by drawing pictures of cats in the dirt with a disembodied finger that she'd taken as a souvenir earlier.

"Sooooo," she said after five minutes had passed and Gilgamesh hadn't shifted from his close-eyed, arm-folded thinking position. "Are you done doing whatever it is you're doing?"

"Yes," Gilgamesh answered, opening his eyes. Pulling himself away from the wall, he strode over to Ciara and unceremoniously tossed her over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes. "We're going now."

"I kinda figured," Ciara said, staring sadly down at the Cheetos scattered across the dirt. She was so busy bemoaning their fate that she didn't even notice that they were moving until she saw the smouldering wreckage of what had once been the town square.

A more accurate summation would be a crater, actually. The place looked as though it had been rezoned for strip mining only for the person heading the project so say 'fuck it' and nuke the town from orbit. All of the buildings had been reduced to rubble, and what remained of the streets couldn't rightly be called pavement so much as it could be called gravel. Solitary flames occasionally flickered across the wreckage, shining through the smoke-clogged air like faerie fire across a swamp, which was redolent with a stench not unlike that of a broken gas line.

And then it happened. One of the few cars that had merely been overturned rather than reduced to what might charitably be described as scrap metal exploded without any apparent provocation. The blast triggered a chain reaction due to the gasoline hanging in the air igniting, with all of the other undestroyed vehicles following suit as they too were engulfed in fiery red halos moments before simultaneously detonating in a symphony of screeching metal and shattered windows.

Flaming shards of steel and glass rained from the sky like confetti from Satan's birthday piñata, feeding the fires that had finally just begun to burn down. It was only through divine intervention that the remains of the town weren't consumed in a massive firestorm that wiped it entirely from the map. In any case, though, it was obvious that rebuilding was going to be a long and very costly process.

Ciara gazed at the destruction from her position slung across Gilgamesh's shoulder. "_Shit_."

"Surely such wanton devastation deserves more than a single-syllable description," Gilgamesh commented, shaking his head at her lack of garrulity.

She deliberated for a moment before shaking her head as well. "Meh, _shit _is the short and sweet summation of this clusterfuck," Ciara decided. "You can practically hear the italics."

Gilgamesh rolled his eyes. "Just get in the Vimana," he sighed, setting her down.

"Whatev-what the hell is that Escher-esque metal monstrosity?"

The monstrosity in question was in its general outline not too dissimilar from a fighter jet, if one turned their head and squinted. However, looking at the thing with a straight gaze caused reality to disappear and pure imagination to take its place.

For all intents and purposes, the Vimana was essentially a gigantic golden triangle affixed to two smaller pylons with razor-edges that looked like they could slice through reinforced steel running parallel to the main body and floating on four acid green protrusions that were either solar panels, sails, or the bastard offspring of the two. Also, it lacked a roof for some reason, which seemed sort of odd if it was in fact meant to be used for battle.

All in all, in Ciara's mind it gave off the distinct vibe of having been designed by someone who habitually forgot to look at the sticky note on their refrigerator that read "Don't forget to take your Risperdal."

Ciara turned to Gilgamesh. "Sheesh, is everything you own gold?" She demanded. "Do you have a prototype set of twenty-four-karat golden anal beads in that Gate of yours?"

"I'll show you later if you're truly so eager to see," was all he said before picking her up and throwing her bodily inside of the Vimana. She slid across the red leather interior and hit the wall with a resounding thunk.

Gilgamesh smirked at her predicament as he slipped inside as well; ignoring her complaints about how the Vimana was a single-seater.

As he steered them up into the air, she shoved her hands into her pockets and attempted to make herself comfortable on the floor, only to wind up desperately clinging to Gilgamesh's leg to keep from tumbling off the edge when he made a sudden turn.

Feeling her death grip on him, he looked down at her rigid figure holding on to his leg like a toy koala on a pencil with a raised brow. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Gazing up at your nutsack with fervent adoration."

"Ah. You may continue. In fact, I insist that you feel free to extrapolate."

Curling up into the swaddling confines of her jacket, Ciara pulled her hood up and shut her eyes against the wind tearing at her face with icy fingers and hoped that the ride back to her house would be a short one.

It took two hours.

**Author's Note: I no longer know where I'm going with this (not that I ever did) but anything that lets me write such random tripe obviously can't be all bad (for me). Seriously though, writing crack is therapeutic. Also: Can you tell that I got bored with the Harry Potter route and decided to go semi-Type-Moon? Because I totally (sorta) did. Like I said, I'm not sure about anything here besides the fact that this story, for lack of a better word, is utterly and deliberately preposterous. **


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